


It Must Be Nice

by Anonymous



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Father Figures, Gen, Injury, Jealousy, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 15:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13638720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Fully three-quarters of what he knows about Aaron Burr he knows because of Alexander Hamilton.  The most personal things Burr himself has unstopped his mouth long enough to say to him directly have been, effectively,I have a lot of money and pull, so don't fuck with meandI have a coat that same color.Inspiring stuff.





	It Must Be Nice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [herowndeliverance (atheilen)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atheilen/gifts).



More and more, Burr resembles his name; he is a close-clinging nuisance George is forced to bear.  It's his fault, he hired him, and there is a complex, accordion-folded set of reasons for this.  Frankly, George isn't wild about any of them, but they're there.  It made sense at the time.

One, the kid is well-connected, clearly going places, a silver spoon, trust fund prince.  Congress whores after such strange gods that George is reluctant to turn away anyone with enough influence to pull in a few more dollars here or there, because those few dollars might one day be what wins the war.

Two, Burr is a decent soldier and an unusually good strategist.  Tactically, he’s a mess, the fool does everything but trip over his own feet, but in the long-term, moving wooden markers across maps in George’s tent, he’s close to brilliant and pretty damn heartless.  He has no hatred for the British but no mercy for them, either, except what he calculates is necessary for the generations to come.  Burr thinks more naturally on that level than any other; thinks in eons, the slow piling up of rock on rock.  Cast him aside, then, and he’d be a terrifying enemy.

Three, Hamilton likes him.  George doesn’t trust Hamilton’s taste, but he more or less trusts his judgment.  So there’s that.

So fine.  Burr can stay in camp, can stay Lt. Col. Burr too for all George cared, but is there any reason he has to be underfoot every minute of the goddamn day?

Like right now—this is a fine example of how Burr unnerves him—there is nothing in this meeting that Burr needs, by right of rank or talent, to be privy to, but for some reason he’s there, sitting in the corner, reading by the light that’s coming through the thinnest and most frayed part of the tent.  Burr is studying for a law degree.  George knows this because about a week ago, Burr took a bullet across his upper arm, a skimming blow that did no real damage but wet his textbook with blood, and Hamilton brought the thing back to the command tent and wiped Burr’s blood off it carefully, delicately, with his handkerchief, scrubbing away every last particle, such is Hamilton's reverence for the written word.  And all the while Hamilton talked an endless blue streak, Burr this and Burr that, he and Burr were going to be partners someday and here Burr is studying.

Fully three-quarters of what he knows about Aaron Burr he knows because of Alexander Hamilton.  The most personal things Burr himself has unstopped his mouth long enough to say to him directly have been, effectively, _I have a lot of money and pull, so don’t fuck with me_ and _I have a coat that same color._   Inspiring stuff.

“You are not famous for your wit in society either,” Martha later says to him, when he complains of this.

They are in bed, sheltered by a damp and drafty farmhouse while most of the men are outside in conditions still worse, and George can’t sleep for being irritated by it, by the division that goes with the hierarchy—this shit is half the reason why they’re having the war—and by his own appreciation of it, his gratitude to be in out of the cold, his liking for the way men’s eyes go to the ground when they see him.

Hamilton-the-cat, restless too though fully comfortable in his feelings of entitlement, walks back and forth across George’s stomach, the sentry currently on watch.

“I’m not Aaron Burr,” George says.

“If you were,” and here Martha interrupts her speech to yawn, “I would have to have you out of bed soon out of fear my husband would be home.”

He trails his fingers across her shoulder.  Her skin is darker than his, so he can see himself clearly limned against her, brought into more precise definition.

“Ha,” he says with no inflection.

Hamilton-the-cat likes Burr, too, which only adds insult to injury.  Thinking of this now, of how he had to suffer through his pissy, picky tom curling around Burr’s ankles with audible purrs, he is filled with renewed dislike.  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have an ungrateful pet.

If he’s going to be honest with himself—and he must, he guesses, because he’s precious short on other options, given the camp is full of vipers and suck-up sycophants doing everything but shoving their résumés and their letters from daddy under his nose—he can admit that he knows that the real reason he disdains Burr is that Hamilton, who is as close and dear to George as his own right hand, throws everything George gives him back in his face while giving his smiles freely to Burr.  Why is an older brother so much more tolerable to him than a father?

The liberties Hamilton allows Burr are _astonishing._   George gets away with an _Alex_ or two.  Burr, cat-indolent in his chair in the corner, gets away with shit like, “You only have a headache because you fell asleep with your forehead halfway on an inkwell, it's your own damn fault, don't drag me into your petty temper.”

It irritates.  Like a burr, it _pesters_.

So one day, George gives in to the fickleness of kings.  It goes against his principles.  It goes with his inclinations.

He acts, and Hamilton is the immediate consequence: Hamilton storming in with his face unflatteringly red and his lips unnervingly white from how tightly he’s holding his mouth.

“I could set my watch by you sometimes,” George says.

Hamilton scoffs.  It’s a hard noise.  “As if you’d ever set your own watch, sir.”

“What _you_ can watch is your mouth.  My personnel decisions—”

“You fired Burr?”

“—are not your concern.”

“I manage your _life_ , everything you do is my concern.  When you set fires, I’m the one who gets burned.  Rehire him.”

Washington loves this boy, but the one thing he won’t take from him is orders.  “No, Alexander.”  It’s the tone of voice that usually acts as warning enough for Hamilton to back down.  They rarely fight, because Hamilton has the instinct common to children of unreliable men: he knows when to cut and run, knows when the battle is useless.

But Hamilton is irrational on the subject of Burr.  “Your fucking arrogance—”

“You’re out of line!”

“Enjoy losing the war, sir,” Hamilton says.  He disappears out the door again.

It surprises George not at all that Hamilton comes back on the next day and is at his desk as though none of this has occurred.  Alex isn’t inclined to give up rank: he’s the cream of the crop, and he has cream’s own instinct for rising.  He is precisely, annoyingly polite.

George thought he was dealing with a wall before, but there is a world of difference, it turns out, between a reluctant protégé and one who is determined to treat you as a stranger.  He suffers through this cold shoulder for two weeks, and then it comes down to either firing Hamilton too—surely this bullshit would count as just cause to anybody brave enough to ask him about it—or doing what he ultimately does, which is to say, with a father’s condescending tenderness towards an irritating child, “I will offer Burr his position back.”

“No,” Hamilton says.  He puts away his pen.

“No?”

“Well, you can offer till your tongue falls out if you want, but he won’t take it.”  Nor, Hamilton’s voice implies, will his own indifference soften again into regard or even respect.  “Do you think a man with his prospects would line up to be humiliated by you, sir?  He has his pride.  Would that I could afford my own.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” George says, and too late he is aware that he sounds, now, _exactly_ like the man he imagines James Hamilton must have been: weak and wheedling, begging for affection while doing nothing to earn it.

Hamilton’s returning look says that he has heard that too.  His gaze is one of horrible confirmation, as if now he knows for sure that George is everything he always suspected him to be.

He says, “I want you to lead the Continental Army to victory, General.  A thing that I had more faith in when we had Burr on the team, frankly.”

“Yes.”  He has to confess that much.  He has missed having that cold bastard in his back pocket.  No one else he knows has Burr’s same totality of vision.

Hamilton is so clearly fighting back the desire to say “so there” that, against all odds, it almost makes George laugh, and as he fights _that_ back, Hamilton’s mouth, incredibly, morphs into something that is almost a rueful grin.

“Oh, what the hell, sir,” he says.  “We’ll muddle through somehow.”

Instead, they muddle their way right into hell.  It is chaos that even George himself does not escape.  He comes through the ambush intact but in the battle incurs a long, shallow cut across his thigh that causes hot blood to spill into his boot with every step he takes.  The wound throbs and, he thinks, good, let it, it’s his _memento mori_.  Remember that you shall die.  Remember that you shall cause your men to die.  You shall lead them into massacre again and again.

Remember this, what he finds in Aaron Burr's tent: Alexander Hamilton horizontal, soaked in blood, with Burr’s scarf tied ineptly but with frightening tightness around his stomach.  Burr is bent over him and speaking a steady stream of nonsense reassurance.

“Nothing more than a scheme to convince you to lie down at last, Alexander.  Now you’re away and well, you’ll be well, this is just that you must rest, shut your everlasting mouth and rest.”

“You love my mouth,” Hamilton says.  His voice is weaker than George has ever heard it.  “It’s obscene how much you love it.”

“It’s obscene what you do with it,” Burr says.  He brushes sweat-soaked, blood-darkened hair off Hamilton’s forehead and bends down and kisses him there, just above his left eyebrow.  It is not only that George himself is not meant to see this, it is that no one is meant to see this.  Even if law and nature did not together contrive against it, this would still be a scene too intimate for witnesses; raw and bloody meat still steaming from the kill is not served at table.  There is savagery here, as there is with so much intemperate love.

He remembers thinking that Burr would make a terrifying enemy.  Now more than ever, he understands why: the cold Burr seems to throw off is not chill at all, but fire so hot it burns Arctic blue-white and confuses its witnesses.

“Stay,” Burr says.  “Dig your heels in, man.  The doctor will come for you soon.  You live through hurricanes.”

“One hurricane.”

Burr’s fingers tangle in his hair.  “I hate you,” he says, with perfect sincerity, perfect dishonesty.  His voice is thickened with tears.  “You pedantic bastard.  Stay alive.”

“That’s what I do best,” Hamilton says, though he sounds drunk, drunk and mumbling.  “Hey, I need to tell you something.”

Burr protests him, but Hamilton overrides him, and George is pointlessly glad for it: glad to know that no amount of love will ever stop Alexander Hamilton from trampling someone flat.

“So glad,” Hamilton says.  His hand floats up and skims Burr’s cheek.  “So glad I met you.  And you—fell.”

“That I did,” Burr says.

George doesn’t know what sound it is he makes that causes Burr to turn—maybe there is none, maybe Burr is only looking for the doctor’s arrival—but suddenly Burr’s eyes are meeting his.  There is blood on Burr’s face where Hamilton has touched it.  They do nothing but look at each other across the distance between them.  Hamilton should be in the middle, George thinks, but he is not—he is on Burr’s side of the tent, and maybe that is right.  That is what he should have seen, certainly.

 _Well,_ he thinks, _not an older brother, so there’s that._

It isn’t that Alex is between him and Burr, a tug-of-war rope.  It’s that where Alex is, Burr is too.  All those meetings with him in the corner, all those nights spent watching Hamilton fall asleep on inkwells.

George stays there, silent in the doorway, until the doctor comes: it is only his arrival that makes Burr, with difficulty, separate himself, and then only to give the man room enough to work.  George pours him a tin cup of water that Burr does not drink; instead, he puts a rag in it and uses it to dab the mud off his cuffs, though not the blood off his face.

“Should I ask how long this has been going on?” George says softly.

Burr, who always wants something, wants nothing now—nothing, at any rate, that George can give.  He only has eyes for Hamilton.  “Oh, it took me longer than it might have.  But when I decide a thing, sir, it stays decided.”

George lifts the tent flap again.  “I have to see to everyone.”  And to himself, for that matter, though if Burr has seen the blood all over his leg or if Burr cares about it is hard to tell.  He adds, more quietly, “Don’t get reckless at this stage, Burr.  Don’t moon over him.”

“I never moon,” Burr says, with unusual and unfair defensiveness, for that, really, is all George has ever seen him do: patiently or impatiently, willingly or unwillingly, he has orbited Hamilton.  It’s strange that just when George is willing to allow that he and Burr are alike—that they are both careful, ambitious, manipulative—he sees too where they are most different.  George chooses the history of the country.  Burr, however long-ranging his plans, will always keep his heart closer to home.  It means he will have to settle for less power, but--

 _He’ll be less lonely_ , something whispers in George’s head, and for a second, the old hatred for Burr returns to him.

But whenever Alex makes the faintest sound of pain, Burr’s whole body tenses toward him, an arrow firing at a single target.  George can never go back to not noticing it.

He puts his hand on Burr’s shoulder.  “He’ll be fine.  The blood—it looks worse than it is.”  He is, in fact, reasonably sure of this, now that he’s seen the doctor’s reaction.  The doctor has taken on the attitude all surgeons take with men who are something other than seconds from death, to wit, that Hamilton is malingering and that he personally has better things to do with his time.

George is almost tempted to stay to watch him try to tell that to Burr.  It would come to gunfire, though, and he has already played witness enough.

Burr looks at him.  His eyes are no longer quite so unreadable.  “Yes, sir.”

“Stay with him until he’s on his feet again,” George says, now pitching his voice to carry and making it officious enough that it’s clear it’s an order, an alibi for however much time Burr spends at Alexander’s side.  “But once he can spare you—Burr, I’ll expect you back at work as soon as he’s well enough to be left.  I need your help seeing a way out of this horrorshow.”

There is a flicker at Burr’s mouth that is not entirely a smile, not entirely not a smile, and somehow it feels more honest than all the polite and chummy grins Burr has otherwise given him over their time together.  He recognizes Alexander’s own smile in it, or maybe, he realizes, it is Burr’s real smile that he recognizes in Alexander’s.  He suddenly recollects that Burr, too, is an orphan.

“Yes, sir,” Burr says again.  By the time he's finished saying it, he has already turned back to Hamilton.  For him, there is no one else in the room.


End file.
